Pareto Chart Mod for Spotfire®

Pareto charts highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors by combining both bars and line charts, with individual values represented by bars in descending order, and the cumulative total represented by the line.

They are useful when analyzing data where many courses of action are competing for attention, for instance indicating the frequency or causes of problems, as well as their cumulative impact. Pareto charts help to find the problems to prioritize in order to observe the greatest overall improvement.

This mod was made possible by a great team of students of the Bachelor's program Software Engineering and Management at Gothenburg University. Thanks to the project owners: Maja Linder, Bardha Ahmeti, Astrid Berntsson, Yuhan Li, Mohammad Zandkarimi, Navya Pulikandla Satyanarayanachetty

Data Requirements

Every mod handles missing, corrupted and/or inconsistent data in different ways. It is advised to always review how the data is visualized.

To make the Pareto chart work properly, the underlying data must be formatted in a certain way. A data table with at least two columns is required. At least one column should contain categories and a second column should contain the values for each category.

Negative values are not allowed in the Pareto chart. If any are detected an error message is displayed.

Setting Up the Mod

In our example dataset, we have two columns: Defects, Frequency
 

A Pareto chart can be configured with the following settings:

• Category axis: The 'Defects' column
• Value axis: The 'Frequency' column

Optionally, another column could be used to color to split the bars with colored segments by another category.

The end result will look something like this:

Interpretation

Pareto analysis is a technique used for decision-making. Pareto principle is based on the 80/20 rule (the red dotted line) which says "80% of impacts are due to 20% of causes". It emphasizes that a major number of issues are created by a relatively smaller number of underlying causes. You can focus on a vital few root causes of the problem and ignore the trivial many.

This chart makes sense for data with counts for values of a nominal variable or category. They show the ordered frequency counts of values for the different levels of a categorical or nominal variable.

A Pareto chart is a statistical chart which orders the causes or problems in the descending order of their frequency and their cumulative impact. Histogram chart is used inside the Pareto chart to rank the causes. This is a special example of a combination chart where the bars are ordered from highest to lowest with the axis on the left and a line (the blue line) for the cumulative frequency represented as a curve with its axis on the right.

Configuring the Mod

Tooltip

You can customize the content of the tooltip displayed when hovering bars, from the visualization properties.

Using the Mod

Marking

• Select a bar to mark it
• Select a marker on the cumulative line to mark bars within the selected cumulative value
• Select the 80/20 cut-off line to mark bars that are within the 80% cumulative value
• Hold the ctrl key to mark several bars and line markers,
• Click and drag to mark several bars and line segments and markers with a rectangle
• Clear any marking by clicking on the background

Hover

• Hover a bar to show tooltip with customizable information
• Hover a cumulative line marker to show a tooltip with the cumulative percentage

In a terminal window:

• npm install
• npm start

In a new terminal window:

• npm run server

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